The woman, Nhem Yen, showed me her one anti-malaria bed net and told me how every evening she agonized over which children to squeeze under it — and which ones to leave out and expose to malarial mosquitoes.

That’s the kind of excruciating question that extreme poverty forces on families.

Most of us couldn’t even comprehend having to make a choice like that.

So 30 years ago half the developing world were near starvation, or did starve.

The share of people in the developing world who live in extreme poverty has been reduced from 1 in 2 in 1980 to 1 in 5 today, according to the World Bank. Now the aim is to reduce that to almost zero by 2030.

That is a huge gain, and a trend we want to continue.

Timeout for a skeptical question that is both callous and common:

When additional kids survive in poor countries, does that really matter? Isn’t the result just a population explosion leading to famine or war, and more deaths?

That’s a frequent objection, but it’s wrong. When child mortality drops and families know that their children will survive, they are more likely to have fewer babies — and to invest more in them. There’s a well-known path from declining child deaths to declining births, which is why Bangladesh is now down to an average of 2.2 births per woman.

An interesting observation I had not seen before.

Ancient diseases are on the way out. Guinea worm and polio are likely to be eradicated in the coming years. Malaria has been brought under control in many countries, and a vaccine may reduce its toll even further.

AIDS is also receding. Last year in southern Africa, I interviewed coffin-makers who told me grumpily that their businesses are in recession because AIDS is no longer killing large numbers of people.

Good news for most is always bad news for some!

The drop in mortality understates the gains, because diseases don’t just kill people but also leave them disabled or unproductive, wrecking the economy. Poor people used to go blind routinely from disease or were unable to work for want of reading glasses. Now they are much less likely to go blind, and far more likely to get glasses.

These achievements aren’t just the result of work by Western donors or aid groups. Some of the biggest gains resulted from economic growth in China and India. When the poor are able to get jobs, they forge their own path out of poverty.

Their embrace of a market economy has pulled hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty.

The world of extreme poverty and disease that characterized life for most people throughout history may now finally be on its way out.

Kea

Millions of people die every year from preventable malaria deaths, due to the ban on DDT. A ban bought into place due to lobbying from white middle class lefty “environmentalists” in rich countries. A ban with no scientific validity.

It is estimated over three billion people have died needlessly as a result. The effect of the DDT ban can hardly be overstated. An internet search will reveal many good articles that explore the absurd reasons for the ban and the appalling cost.

“DDT is a preventive measure. It just turns malaria on and off like a switch,” said Dr. Art Robinson, biochemist and president of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. “The number of children slaughtered by the ban of DDT is greater than any other genocide in world history.” Robinson challenged Dr. Rutledge to go find out for himself, inspiring what became a five-year project including a journey through Africa, India, and Indonesia to witness the carnage firsthand, and several trips to Washington, D.C., to answer the question, “Why did they ban that chemical?”

KiwiGreg

hj

Some of the biggest gains resulted from economic growth in China and India. When the poor are able to get jobs, they forge their own path out of poverty.
……………..
And they are the biggest investors in green energy (China) but not nearly enough. The coal fired plants are being produced at 2/day(?) so we are on track for that planetary warming.
Meanwhile National is taking a lead from the Koch brothers advocating sprawl + car rather than planning for energy efficient urban infrastructure.
Nationals policies are the market driven headless chicken model.

hj

“For thousands of generations, a vast majority of humans have lived brief, illiterate lives marked by disease, disability and the loss of children.”
……………
yet when out of 13 children of whites captured by Native Americans, (even after seeing their parents murdered) after about 4 months all but two wanted to stay with their Indian families. The two (or three?) who were willingly repatriated spoke well of their Comanche abductees. Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years in those societies it was the adaptive evolutionary environment.
What’s more the Indians weren’t (in their view) cast out of the Garden of Eden; they lived in the Garden of Eden.

hj

Kea (8,130) Says:
October 2nd, 2013 at 7:41 am
Millions of people die every year from preventable malaria deaths, due to the ban on DDT. A ban bought into place due to lobbying from white middle class lefty “environmentalists” in rich countries. A ban with no scientific validity.
…..
Indiscriminate use meant bugs exposed to low doses were gaining immunity. It is still sprayed on walls.

hj

Kea (8,130) Says:
October 2nd, 2013 at 7:41 am
Millions of people die every year from preventable malaria deaths, due to the ban on DDT. A ban bought into place due to lobbying from white middle class lefty “environmentalists” in rich countries. A ban with no scientific validity
*****
Yep, quite right.
And the flat earth society wankers ignore the likes of Paul Reiter at Institute Pasteur, The World authority on malaria.

Camryn

hj – Nice story, but it’s only a parable about the adaptability of children unless Native American children abducted by whites *did* want to return to their original tribe. I don’t think you enough evidence to say that children were making judgements on the relative merits of the two societies instead of just playing it safe by sticking with the situation they were in over the unknown risks of a different situation.

hj

One thing relevant to New Zealand is that living standards are going down for the majority and house prices are increasing, whereas property investors are feeding on the capital gains of a market fuelled by expectations of an increasing population (of well heal buyers). A Chinese leader called NZ “the last paradise”.

slightlyrighty

Yoza.

I think that you might find that those who put their faith in socialism to provide for them are the ones who end up in poverty in NZ, whereas those who embrace the concept that they, and they alone are responsible for their own prosperity tend to do better.

funny that.

In NZ, we provide healthcare and education as a foundation to all to achieve their potential. That so many look to the state to give them their potential, rather than go out and achieve it through their own efforts, is an indictment on the the way welfare has come to be regarded, rather than how it was originally envisaged.

wf

Some may remember the time when Roman Catholic families were routine ly large & 7 or 8 children quite common.

With the introduction of Women’s Liberation & the contraceptive pill, and after a lot of dire threats from the clergy, Roman Catholic women too matters into their own hands and families decreased in size. Suddenly RC kids couldn’t be identified by their hand-me-down clothes and permanently hungry, harassed look.

Cato

Yoza is right.

Hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders are literally starving to death – forced to eat grass and, even each other. Calorific intact must have plummeted since the 1980s and we all know about the emaciation epidemic among our most vulnerable citizens and children.

The other day I was held up at the checkout because somebody was using a WINZ voucher to buy emergency supplies of chips and chocolate biscuits, and I saw she was texting away on an iPhone 3. My god, John Key’s New Zealand has shut her out of the latest iOS!

But it’s not just about material well-being – man does not live on bread alone, after all. To think, in this day and age, we expect beneficiaries to get along with the basic Sky TV package – no Sky Sports.

nickb

Ed Snack

Kea, the whole DDT saga is more nuanced than your emotional appeals have it. Yes, DDT was banned in many places, but the impact on malaria was muted for a number of reasons. First, an often cited case is Sri Lanka, where DDT stopped being used in the mid 1960’s. However the main reason DDT was phased out was that they believed that they had actually beaten malaria, the number of cases was so low that their entire anti-malaria campaign was dismantled as being no longer required and an unnecessary expense. Unfortunately malaria was still around and because there was no more eradication going on it underwent a resurgence that is still being dealt with today; but it wasn’t the “Silent Spring” effect that had them stop using DDT, it was ironically, in that case anyway, a victim of its own initial success.

And that’s just an example. The other major problem was that DDT was being massively over-used for pest control in many inappropriate ways, cotton crops for example were damn near drenched in the stuff (cotton suffers significantly from pest depredations like boll weevil and others) and this overuse was leading to widespread resistance building up. Many of the problems such as egg-shell thinning were exaggerated, but there were problems and DDT does bio-accumulate. One can understand the issues that led to the various bans.

However what is much harder to excuse is the foolish refusal by many in the anti-everything brigades to consider a re-introduction in controlled ways. When used sparingly inside DDT is an extremely effective anti-mosquito and hence anti-malarial agent. It is sprayed around the walls where mosquitoes will land and rest between meals and it acts both as a repellant and as a killer, so mosquitoes basically won’t stay in a house that has been treated in that way. Very effective and cheap. In trials it is far more effective than treated bed nets or any other alternatives, and it is simple and cheap.

Failure to allow the re-introduction of this and other related campaigns has lead to numerous deaths, deaths that the anti-brigade are directly responsible for. Don’t expect even a sorry though.

Those opposed to its use will claim that DDT was never formally banned, however it was effectively banned by administrative and bureaucratic action, under pressure many of the major funding organizations did refuse to fund any anti-malarial campaigns that involved DDT; so the lack of a formal ban is a red-herring.

hj

Camryn (430) Says:

I don’t think you enough evidence to say that children were making judgements on the relative merits of the two societies instead of just playing it safe by sticking with the situation they were in over the unknown risks of a different situation.
…………………..
but these children were old enough to know both before and after.

Cato

As Yoza has demonstrated that he is quite irony impaired let me just point out that, in terms of material things, poor people today have it much better than the middle-class did in 1980. That’s indisputable.

Google “Gordon Gekko cellphone” – that absurd brick cost more than a luxury car did in 1987. And yet now, thanks to fierce market competition, practically every ward of the state in the English speaking world has access to superior technology. And yet, if Yoza had his way, we would still be forced to wait 6 months to have a landline telephone line installed in our house by a government monopoly.

Go a bit further back and look at cars. Before Henry Ford, evil capitalist who **gasp** made a profit on his wares, only the super-rich had access to car. The rich man drove a crappy Jackson Model C and the poor man walked. Today, the rich man drives a late model Lexus or Prius and the poor man drives a beat up old Honda Civic.

To some of us that’s progress – but to those who live by the perverted logic that the equal sharing of squalor is preferable to the uneven sharing of general prosperity – it’s a sign of regression.

Yvette

flipper 8:08 “And the flat earth society wankers ignore the likes of Paul Reiter at Institute Pasteur, The World authority on malaria.”

If you walk around the surface of what you believe is a round Earth, you feet will follow a circumference [12,742 km x pi] 40,030.17359 km, while the head – further out, following a circle of diameter 6ft longer – will travel [12,742.0018288 x pi] 40030.179337 km – a difference of 0.005747388425km or 18.85 feet.
So your head would be 18.85 feet further on than when you started.
Which doesn’t happen.
And it doesn’t happen when both lines [travel of head and feet] are parallel.
When the Earth is flat.
Don’t fuck with us Flat Earth People.

hj

You have to link to the Comments to get the good oil:

I would take issue with the thesis, GROWTH led to decline in poverty. I believe less unequal distribution of the national resources, is the answer, not unfettered growth. Bangladesh has half the per capita ‘PPP’ of India but in key HDIs Bangladesh is ahead of India. Economic liberalization since 1991 so far only had a NET NEGATIVE IMPACT in India. Kerala with a population of Canada clearly demonstrated it in 1970s!

Reid

The poverty we have in NZ is not material it’s spiritual. I don’t mean in the religious sense although that is a fact I mean in the sense that gainful employment of any kind provides a sense of self-respect because it means to you that you are making your own way in life. If that sense is not present in one’s life we quickly become broken creatures and that generates a whole lot of outward circumstances which some-to-many people mistakenly sheet home to lack of income when its not lack of income at all its lack of outcome that causes poverty, in this country. And both lack of outcome and success in outcomes comes from inside ourselves because if someone is determined to change they will make it happen, that’s innate in every human being. And that’s the only difference between someone whose materially successful and someone whose not – their determination to change – which guess what, is a spiritual element not a material one.

Something that has the potential to help a great deal in dealing with this is setting up a nationwide mentoring program, matching individuals and families in “poverty” with volunteers who aren’t. I know its idealistic but you know what? There are plenty of people who “have,” who would find great satisfaction in helping those who “haven’t” to find their way back onto the pathway. Of course there are plenty of obstacles, not least the lack of will amongst the have nots to participate whether out of sheer embarrassment or laziness or whatever. And with the boomer retirees there’s a growing pool of people with both the knowledge and time on their hands. But we have all the bits available. We know who the people are who could benefit, setting up a website for volunteers to register would be easy, all we need is the political will to put the pieces into play.

If China were simply following the path of rich countries from poverty through pollution to fresh air, there would be little to worry about (unless you lived in one of those hellish cities). But the parallels fall apart, for two reasons. One is time. When Britain’s industrial engine was gaining speed, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were the same as they had been for millennia. Now they are half as high again, and not far off 450 parts per million, which most scientists think is the danger level. The other is place. China is so vast and its economy is growing so rapidly that its effect on the world is far greater than that of any other single country.

If China cannot cut its CO2 emissions substantially, then either other countries will have to reduce theirs by more than they are doing now—which seems unlikely—or the world will need to find other ways to cope. That means exploring the possibilities of geoengineering the atmosphere or investing in ways of adapting to higher temperatures, such as drought-tolerant crops.

Reid

davidp

Am I the only person who sees the tragedy in a family and country that isn’t able to buy a few mosquito nets at a couple of bucks each? That’s a nation-wide failure on a massive scale. We know how to create wealthy countries, so why do some countries (essentially) organise themselves for poverty?

hj

Reid Syas:
“And both lack of outcome and success in outcomes comes from inside ourselves because if someone is determined to change they will make it happen, that’s innate in every human being.”
………………..
innate ability follows the normal curve but families and support groups make a difference . Ratios of people to resources matter. We can’t all be the first mover and so society needs to reshuffle the cards (as when the land is concentrated amongst first movers). You can’t make blood from a stone.

Weihana

Cato (636) Says:
October 2nd, 2013 at 8:59 am

As Yoza has demonstrated that he is quite irony impaired let me just point out that, in terms of material things, poor people today have it much better than the middle-class did in 1980. That’s indisputable.

Google “Gordon Gekko cellphone” – that absurd brick cost more than a luxury car did in 1987. And yet now, thanks to fierce market competition, practically every ward of the state in the English speaking world has access to superior technology. And yet, if Yoza had his way, we would still be forced to wait 6 months to have a landline telephone line installed in our house by a government monopoly.

Go a bit further back and look at cars. Before Henry Ford, evil capitalist who **gasp** made a profit on his wares, only the super-rich had access to car. The rich man drove a crappy Jackson Model C and the poor man walked. Today, the rich man drives a late model Lexus or Prius and the poor man drives a beat up old Honda Civic.

To some of us that’s progress – but to those who live by the perverted logic that the equal sharing of squalor is preferable to the uneven sharing of general prosperity – it’s a sign of regression.

Great narrative, but seemingly divorced from reality. Contrary to Tea Party hysteria there is virtually no one in the western world advocating some communist style dictatorship the likes of which has caused misery in those societies unfortunate to be the guinea pigs of such an experiment. However, if one examines the actual historical record, as opposed to the right-wing fiction, they will notice that marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans were once much higher than they are today and income inequality much lower, but the United States was not a communist state and it enjoyed the kind of economic growth that you refer to.

It is difficult to discuss economics with a conservative without being bombarded by this false dilemma between neo-liberalism and communist tyranny. Many conservatives these days laud the superiority of the western model but seem completely unfamiliar with the fact that the western model is not some free market fantasy from an Ayn Rand novel but a more progressive arrangement where a healthy respect for markets co-exists with the notion that we are all bound by a social contract.

While it is true that technology has continued to improve your assertion that poor people today are better off than the middle class in 1980 is in fact disputable. Real median incomes in the United States have stagnated since the 80s while productivity has continued to increase.

Reid

hj I guarantee you I could take any family who were determined to change and change their circumstances for the better.

The amount of time it would take and the amount of change achieved depends on nothing but their willingness (i.e. their determination) to change.

Getting out of NZ-style “poverty” is not rocket science and I bet you or anyone else on this blog would be able to tell them exactly what to do same as I would, proving it’s common sense.

Of course the first thing one needs to do is to tell them to stop blaming anyone, including themselves, for their own circumstances. Never again. Just deal with it, you are where you are through no fault of anyone, it’s not some banker or politician’s fault and it’s not your fault either. That’s the first lesson. Let’s assume they learn that in 20 seconds. Secondly, tell them that no-one is going to come to save them and pick you up and carry them out of poverty. Not a politician and not a banker and not a social worker. They have to climb out themselves, period. There are people who will show them the route but they have to walk it, run it or sprint it and it’s up to them how fast they proceed. Third, immediately drop every single enervating thing in their lives: no more alcohol, drugs, porn, computer games, crap food, swearing, anger, envy, laziness, gluttony, dishonesty. Fourth, immediately start doing everything positive they can think of from vigorous physical exercise to loving their children and paying attention to them to immersing themselves in nothing but uplifting thoughts and activities of all kinds. Fifth, find out their personal makeup through tools like Myers-Briggs etc and give them programs that will allow them to exercise their gifts and talents.

The list is endless, hj. But for some reason, lefties always stumble over the first hurdle, pretending that there’s some invisible force that cannot be overcome which ruthlessly suppresses these capable creatures of light and thus the problem is never solved, not even a little bit, because instead of teaching people how to swim in the ocean, lefties try to boil it off so there is no more ocean to harm the poor oppressed people who keep drowning. And as we all know, this approach is not just impractical, it’s impossible. Thus explaining the continual reality we see around us. And of course the poor darlings who keep drowning in the ocean aren’t to know that the lefty plan to boil it off will never work in a million years, so of course they keep voting for that solution, because who wants the nasty old ocean, it’s a great meany of a thing, that’s just self-evident, they think to themselves. It never occurs to them that how come other people don’t drown, like they do, because the lefties tell them those people are all, to a person, exclusively privileged silver-spoon lucky people who can swim not because they taught themselves but for other reasons, like they all had rich parents who bought them all rubber rafts for them to majestically float on without them having to do a thing.

Tell me that’s not precisely what lefties do, hj.

I don’t understand why, quite frankly. I mean, it’s evil, in my mind, to say what lefties say to poor people, because it keeps them in a perpetual state of learned helplessness. And educated lefties are not drowners, you’re swimmers, like most of us, so you do know what it takes. None of what I said above is rocket science or new to lefties, is it. And it’s not wrong is it. This is exactly what you say. And you have to know you cannot boil the ocean, you have to know its impossible, it will never work. So why keep saying that the problem is the ocean, rather than their inability to swim? Beats me, mate. It’s definitely not helping those who lefties claim to be caring for, that’s for real.

Weihana

Reid (14,116) Says:
October 2nd, 2013 at 10:40 am

Third, immediately drop every single enervating thing in their lives: no more alcohol, drugs, porn, computer games…

Computer games are not enervating.

Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester have discovered that playing action video games trains people to make the right decisions faster. The researchers found that video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, and this benefit doesn’t just make them better at playing video games, but improves a wide variety of general skills that can help with everyday activities like multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town.

Cato

Weihana! Great to see you again you old sea dog!

Don’t construct a straw man argument, I wasn’t saying there is a straight choice between a free-enterprise system and a communist dystopia, I was disputed Yoza’s basically idiotic comment that “New Zealand’s embrace of the market economy has seen a plunge into poverty…”

If we were to have that argument, we could say the same between the false choice often presented between tame, socially democratic Sweden and the libertarian dystopia that is Somalia. A choice you basically put forward with your Ayn Rand comment.

The point is: how do we measure poverty?

Ask yourself this question – would you rather have the conveniences and amenities available to the lower quintile in 1987 or the conveniences and amenities available to the lower quintile in 2013?

Thatcher’s observation is still salient, you would rather have the poor poorer provided the rich were less rich.

OTGO

Reid 10.40 Great post that. I remember going to listen to Precious McKenzie speak at a function once about his life. To this day I have never heard a more motivating tale than his. A lot of NZers who are in “poverty” could do themselves a favour and learn his story.

Weihana

Ask yourself this question – would you rather have the conveniences and amenities available to the lower quintile in 1987 or the conveniences and amenities available to the lower quintile in 2013?

Thatcher’s observation is still salient, you would rather have the poor poorer provided the rich were less rich.

No, I don’t want to eliminate inequality but I do think rising and excessive inequality is a problem and there is no evidence that the poor were poorer because of reduced inequality. You cite technological advances but nowhere is there evidence that such advancements depend on the rising inequality experienced since the 1980s and moreover rising inequality has coincided with stagnation in real median incomes. The premise of the Thatcherite position appears to be that the Gordon Gekko phone was a useless brick because of a lack of market competition rather than the fact that it was the 1980s and perfectly in line with the technological advancement of the era. In fact the exponential improvements to computing technology on which our current mobile devices depends has been steadily advancing for over 100 years regardless of varying economic policies, recessions, depressions and even world wars.

The thing is I don’t necessarily oppose the reforms of the Thatcher/Reagan/Douglas era, but I think the baby was in some respects thrown out with the bath water. While you criticize my argument as a straw man, and I acknowledge that your point was in regards to a specific comment made, in general the modern right-wing narrative (in my view) tends toward an extreme: taxes are always to be lowered, inequality is never something to be concerned about, regulations are always to be avoided etc.

So do I want to live in 2013 or 1987? 2013 definitely, but I do not agree that these modern conveniences depend upon the right-wing economic model of “greed is good”. I genuinely believe our future economic wellbeing is threatened by rising inequality, stagnating real median incomes, limited job growth and a reduction in the purchasing power of the middle class. Future economic growth in my view depends on ensuring that productivity gains are more widely shared amongst society. Everyone’s income is someone else’s spending. Inequality cannot continue to increase unchecked without consequence.

Unfortunately I do not believe that such inequality will be addressed through right-wing narratives on the laziness of the lower classes.

mikenmild

Fentex

This isn’t quite true..

“For thousands of generations, a vast majority of humans have lived brief, illiterate lives marked by disease, disability and the loss of children.”

The famous statistics on brevity of human life expectancy before modern times are almost entirely due to childhood mortality.
If you survived to five you have always been half way to a decent life span.

It’s the decrease in childhood mortality that is the best answer to low life expectancy, and in concert will rising wealth will contribute most to reductions in populations as we’ve long known that increasing wealth and health correlate with reducing birth rates.

That doesn’t, however, reduce population pressures on the environment. The wealth that protects the young creates demand that pressures resources.

The success in improving the situation of the poorest third of humanity is a strong argument for free trade between nations for as wealth correlates with decreased childhood mortality and decreased populations free trade correlates with that increase of wealth for the worlds poorest.

Fentex

help with everyday activities like multitasking,

This detail is nonsense. Humans cannot multitask, and although a person may be compelled to switch attention quickly and often it should not be sought out as a solution to problems because switching attention is a slow and expensive act that reduces anyone’s ability to perform well.

Cato

I don’t think the Gordon Gekko phone was useless in the context of the time, I just marvel how – just such a short time ago – it was state of the art. You couldn’t give it away today when you have so much choice of better, cheaper phones that are affordable by practically everyone.

That amazing progress – not replicated in any of the government dominated sectors of the economy – isn’t due to to rising inequality per se but it is due the the dynamic market for cellphone handsets. Imagine if we had that kind of progress in health care, where costs declined in tandem with technological improvements? Instead, we have gradually improving technology with escalating costs thanks to a bureaucrat-centric delivery system.

You say you would rather live in 2013 than 1987 but don’t attribute those improvements to rising inequality. But can you attribute them to government redistribution either? I will bet that most of the improvements in the lives of ordinary people in those years is attributable mostly to improvements in goods and services developed by private enterprises. Redistribution puts a brake on that.

Is rising inequality a good thing? No – though a measure of inequality will be with us always. However, it is the price we pay for having the kind of economy that – in absolute terms – improves the lives of everybody. It is a necessary evil because the only serious measures you can take to combat it are the same ones as stifle the incentives of businesses to pursue profits by means of improved and cheaper services rather than by crony capitalism and monopoly.

You are clearly a clever person but I wish you would get past this zero-sum thinking.

Weihana

Cato (639) Says:
October 2nd, 2013 at 12:20 pm

I don’t think the Gordon Gekko phone was useless in the context of the time, I just marvel how – just such a short time ago – it was state of the art. You couldn’t give it away today when you have so much choice of better, cheaper phones that are affordable by practically everyone.

That amazing progress – not replicated in any of the government dominated sectors of the economy – isn’t due to to rising inequality per se but it is due the the dynamic market for cellphone handsets. Imagine if we had that kind of progress in health care, where costs declined in tandem with technological improvements? Instead, we have gradually improving technology with escalating costs thanks to a bureaucrat-centric delivery system.

Yes it is due to a market for cellphone handsets. But the pace of progress itself is based upon the fact that the technology in question is an information technology. We construct the computer chips of tommorrow with the technology of today and the increasing capabilities of the technology depend primarily on knowledge and information rather than natural resources, this leads to exponential growth.

The market is certainly a key factor, but you see markets existed before the 1980s. The exponential growth in computing, upon which our modern mobile devices are based, has progressed STEADILY for over 100 years. That we have these mobile devices has nothing to do with Thatcher or Reagan or Douglas. It is the nature of the technology itself which, by the way, has been heavily dependent on government investment in the technology over a long period of time.

Health care is not, traditionally, an information technology and so there is no reason to expect that it would experience the kind of exponential growth that computing has. You’re comparing apples with oranges and it has nothing to do with government expenditure of healthcare. In fact health care is now becoming an information technology. The cost of DNA sequencing for instance has reduced exponentially in cost because this, like computing, is an information technology. The fact that the government pays for healthcare does not prevent this, nor does it prevent the existence of markets for healthcare.

You say you would rather live in 2013 than 1987 but don’t attribute those improvements to rising inequality. But can you attribute them to government redistribution either? I will bet that most of the improvements in the lives of ordinary people in those years is attributable mostly to improvements in goods and services developed by private enterprises. Redistribution puts a brake on that.

No it doesn’t. There is no evidence that “redistribution” puts a brake on development. If it were excessive, then yes. But the relatively high taxation rates did not stop technological advancement prior to the 80s. Productivity has increased steadily for a long period of time. Technology has improved steadily for a long period of time. Computing performance per $1000 has increased steadily for over 100 years. The concern today though is that while productivity continues to increase the benefits are not as distributed as they once were. This cannot continue indefinitely. There is no point making widgets for a society that cannot afford them and that is why the stagnation of real median incomes should concern people.

You are clearly a clever person but I wish you would get past this zero-sum thinking.

It isn’t zero-sum at all. By redistributing income and increasing the purchasing power of consumers overall you would generate more productivity. Your income is someone else’s spending. If inequality is allowed to go on unchecked productivity will ultimately be constrained as the super-rich take an increasing share of a diminishing pie.

I would define poverty as an extreme absence of that which is required to sustain the individual in the environment they find themselves. Flipper, for example, suffers from a poverty of intellect which renders him vulnerable in an environment where his narrow interpretation of reality is brought into question. Poverty in New Zealand would be defined as an extreme absence of the forms of capital (not necessarily financial), opportunity and associations required to sustain someone in a meaningful existence.

The reduction of poverty in the developing world has far less to do with embracing economic models than it does with indigenous mass movements throwing off the yoke of economic colonialism and developing economies that serve domestic rather than foreign agendas. The other contributor to the alleviation of poverty in under developed regions has been the ability of Western eyes to witness the misery being imposed on those regions to sustain Western lifestyles, this has led growth of informal solidarity networks that have helped to improve living conditions – although, it should not be overstated, the greatest contributor to alleviating the poverty in under developed regions is by a long way those people fighting for their humanity against a vicious and rapacious Western corporate machine that has been looting the planet on a massive scale for well over 200 years.

“It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us.”

The ability to limit what one accepts as poverty leads is a dead end, as Marie Antoinette and the Romanovs could attest.

Cato

The problem is Weihana, is that focussing on cellphones – which I used as an example and not as a lynch-pin – is just one obvious example of where access to the good things in life has been rapidly expanded by allowing people to get incredibly rich by providing those things cheaper and at greater profit margins.

All those things have improved peoples lives – at a rate much faster than they had been – with the general freeing of Western economies that followed the crisis of managed capitalism in the late 1970s.

Weihana

Cato (641) Says:
October 2nd, 2013 at 1:09 pm

The problem is Weihana, is that focussing on cellphones – which I used as an example and not as a lynch-pin – is just one obvious example of where access to the good things in life has been rapidly expanded by allowing people to get incredibly rich by providing those things cheaper and at greater profit margins.

Except that example does not support your position. There is no evidence that computing performance expanded due to allowing people to get incredibly rich. As I said, computing performance has been improving at a steady exponential rate since before the discovery of “Moore’s law” and perhaps as far back as 100 years.

Modern mobile devices have their capabilities as a consequence of Moores law which is not an invention of Maggie Thatcher. Commercialization does require the existence of markets and competition, but it does not depend on the inequality of the post 80s era and it is silly to ignore the role government has played in spurring the basic research and innovation on which private companies have subsequently capitalized.

Indeed it isn’t a “lynch-pin” for your general proposition, it doesn’t support your position at all. Computing performance is slowing now due to physical constraints on Moore’s law… nothing to do with your economic philosophy vs mine.

All those things have improved peoples lives – at a rate much faster than they had been – with the general freeing of Western economies that followed the crisis of managed capitalism in the late 1970s.

By what measure? Where is the evidence that peoples lives have improved at a rate “much faster than they had been”? Technology of the 2010s is better than the 1980s… just as the 1980s was better than the 1950s… this doesn’t prove your proposition. It just proves that technology gets better over time.

However we can clearly see that real median incomes rose in line with productivity from the 50s to the 70s but has largely stagnated since then.

I agree that there was a need for reform by the 1980s but the pendulum has swung too far and the trickle down theory of letting people get incredibly rich without expecting them to contribute more has not been to the benefit of society overall.

Cato

Except for it does – because it’s demonstrably true that increases in the quality and affordability of consumer goods involves massive increases in wealth for the producers. And yet, where there are state monopolies – or virtual monopolies – there is a real absence of innovation (partly because the calculus of risk/reward is so different, but also, because monopolies just have a different attitude towards their customers).

The question is why has my cellphone become so much better and accesible over such a miraculously short space of time? There have been technological changes, yes – but then how come Blackberries have become such a rubbish item? They had the benefit of the microprocessor too, you know. The iPhone outstriped the Crackberry because it is a superior consumer product – which has benefited all of us – even if that came at the price of Steve Jobs making a ton of money (and the world a little less equal).

Weihana

Cato (642) Says:
October 2nd, 2013 at 4:06 pm

The question is why has my cellphone become so much better and accesible over such a miraculously short space of time? There have been technological changes, yes – but then how come Blackberries have become such a rubbish item? They had the benefit of the microprocessor too, you know. The iPhone outstriped the Crackberry because it is a superior consumer product – which has benefited all of us – even if that came at the price of Steve Jobs making a ton of money (and the world a little less equal).

Because it is an exponentially improving techology. It is important to understand how exponentials work to grasp the point I am making. Count linearly 1, 2, 3….. 30. Now count exponentially 2, 4, 8…. 1 billion. Exponential progress makes people perceive that things explode out of nowhere when in actual fact the trajectory of the technology was predictable. Microprocessors have been improving at the pace of Moore’s law since long before the 80s. Gordon E Moore described the trend in 1965, noting the improvements since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. People like Ray Kurzweil have constructed trends which purport to show that Moore’s law is only one paradigm in a longer trend extending back over 100 years.

The point is that Moore’s law provides an objective measurement of technological progress. Not only that but it is a formulation that takes account of the COST of the transistors and it doesn’t show that quality and affordability have improved because of market reforms in the 80s.

J Hartley

It’s a shame that these sorts of articles aren’t the narrative that we hear on more mainstream news broadcasts. The fact that poverty is being eradicated and that people (journalists, even!) are seeing the positive effects of smart, healthy decisions being made is fantastic. This kind of positive story deserves to be heard. We need to know these facts, not so that we can rest on our laurels and be overly proud of ourselves, but so that we can push further forward to the Millennium Development Goals of 2020 and other major developmental milestones and acknowledge that the world is getting better for some.

“When child mortality drops and families know that their children will survive, they are more likely to have fewer babies — and to invest more in them.” I agree that it is not a well-known fact (I had no idea about this), but it is something that, again, should be celebrated.

It would be interesting to see how New Zealand shapes up, not in terms of global poverty, but in terms of relative poverty (for example within the OECD countries). It turns out that since the mid-1980s, the income gap between the rich and the poor has grown in New Zealand faster than in any other developed country (Max Rashbrooke, “Why Inequality Matters,”). Does anyone else know any statistics about this? It’s great to see that global poverty’s trend is on the decline (see Bono’s Ted talk here for details http://www.ted.com/talks/bono_the_good_news_on_poverty_yes_there_s_good_news.html), but what about in NZ?

That’s why Tanzania became such an economic powerhouse of general prosperity after the war – while Hong Kong stagnated and remained a backwards little island.

The point being the yoke of European economic imperialism did nothing to improve the lot of the indigenous people in either of those instances. The Chinese, most especially, did not require a British jackboot to raise the standard of living across China – Hong Kong was little more than an after taste of the flavour of racial supremacy the Brits fed to the Chinese mainland.

hj

Reid:

for some reason, lefties always stumble over the first hurdle, pretending that there’s some invisible force that cannot be overcome which ruthlessly suppresses these capable creatures of light and thus the problem is never solved, not even a little bit, because instead of teaching people how to swim in the ocean, lefties try to boil it off so there is no more ocean to harm the poor oppressed people who keep drowning. And as we all know, this approach is not just impractical, it’s impossible.
………………….
There are always some people who will succeed but that doesn’t mean everyone in a society can achieve the same level of wealth at once.
Some people in Singapore have a suburban type section but the place is so crowded they are talking about building underground. The same applies to food in some places